You can pause updates in Viewport 2.0, in the Material Viewer, and in other editors such as the UV Editor. This allows you to make changes in your scene without having to wait for the editors to update. This can be especially useful when you have a complex scene.
Click
in the Maya status line or in the
Material Viewer toolbar to pause updates. Paused editors appear with a red border and the text
Paused to indicate their paused state. If an image of the last cached render exists, the
Material Viewer displays this image in lieu of the text
Paused.
When you click
in the Maya status line, all editors that use the Viewport 2.0 renderer are also paused. This includes the
Material Viewer and the
UV Editor. Likewise, these editors are also paused if you click
in the
Material Viewer while it is set to use the hardware renderer.
Click
again to lift the pause, and the scene is updated with all the changes made while paused. The contents of each affected panel are re-rendered and monitoring of scene updates resumes.
A paused state is retained when you open a different scene, but the pause is lifted when you create a new scene.
To pause Viewport 2.0 upon startup, set the environment variable MAYA_VP2_PAUSE_ON_STARTUP to 1, or set the optionVar vp2PauseState to 1.
You can also enable the Pause Viewport 2.0 (startup) option in the Display category of the Preferences window.